Retaining your twitter followers is not as easy as it seems. The reason is that people do not understand that twitter is not a market place. It is a place to share your ideas and network. This means that you have to provide value for your following or they will start to unfollow you. If you are not familiar with twitter read my beginner guide to twitter to get started.

I follow back practically 95% people that follow me. Some people say that it is not a good policy, but I disagree. Following people back is a way to show appreciation for the people that took time to follow you. Anyway, here are my concepts on how to get twitter followers to stick.

Tweet For Value

When you tweet, your message must be interesting for your followers. It can either be funny or in someway related to your niche. If you are using twitter the right way, then most of your followers will be targeted. These targeted people are normally looking for targeted tweets. Always think that would your followers want to read this, and you will be well off.

Tweet also some of the popular stuff that is around. These tweets have normally pretty good content and most people love them.

Tweet Regularly

Do your tweeting regularly. I would suggest to tweet at least once every day. If you tweet only once a week, some more active tweeters may decide to unfollow you. This is especially true now that there are tools that can automate the process of removing inactive tweeters.

ReTweet Stuff from your Followers

Many of the people that follow you also make valuable tweets. By tweeting the stuff that your active followers have tweeted, you show them appreciation. This only applies when your follower is a more Joe Average, than a mega tweeter.

Do not Overly Advertise

When you use twitter, you can and should tweet your own posts. It is a way to notify your following that you have new stuff available. This does not mean, that you should tweet the new post 10 times every day. If you continuously tweet only your own posts, then people will get tired and unfollow you.You can retweet your posts again, but do not over do it. As a rule I would not tweet more than two of my own posts per day.

Conclusion

Twitter is a place to network. It is not a place to spam. Always keep in mind, that will your followers like your tweets and everything will go just fine.

All comments are welcome. What do you do to make your followers stick?

I am  starting a case study of the effectiveness of social bookmarking sites. Until now I have not been active in that area. I have only added some of my posts to  Digg and StumbleUpon, because they have not delivered. Maybe I have used them in the wrong?

Anyway, now is the time to really put these sites into the test.

My efforts

I am going to add all the posts here to the following social bookmarking sites:

• Propeller
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Kirtsy
• Mixx
• Folkd
• Mr. Wong
• Delicious

I have around 40 posts so submitting to all these sites will take some time. Probably at least a few days.

Do you know of other great social bookmarking sites that I should use? If you do, please tell me

How I Evaluate the Results

I will evaluate the results based on the traffic I get from these sites. The traffic will be counted by google analytics. I am going to report all my findings here for your enjoyment.

I Need Help from You

Have you used these sites before and how successful have you been? What type of results can I expect? Is there something else that I should do besides just posting the links there?

This article is about how to get started with Twitter. It is pretty easy to start using it, but the how to use escapes many people. Some people even think that twitter is a silver bullet for online marketing. It is not. It is just another place to network, communicate and chat.

Short Introduction to Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that allows users to write short 140 char messages, tweets. The basis of twitter are followers.

On Twitter you can choose,  do you start to follow. When you follow someone, you also start to receive their tweets. And vice versa, people who follow you will receive your tweets. This means that the amount of followers you have, will affect the amount of readers you get for your messages.

Getting Followers

The way to get followers is to follow people and hope that they follow you back. I’d say that around 25% of the people that you follow, will follow you back, so you are pretty well off with this strategy.

Many people who start out with twitter,  just run around and try to follow all the people they find. It is a big error, because you should only follow targeted people. Follow people that will likely be interested in your blog and in your tweets. The more interested the people are, the more clicks you will get. It’s that simple.

You can find targeted followers by looking at people that follow similar people as you are. For example, I have looked at problogger’s followers and started to follow people that follow him. Another great way is to find lists that contain people that fit your niche. Just go through the list follow all the people there. Some are bound to follow you back.

What and How to Tweet

As a blogger you should always tweet your new blog posts. By tweeting, you tell your close readers about the new post. You should also tweet other people’s blog posts and retweet some of their tweets. Just remember that the tweets should also be helpful for your followers. Basically keep in your niche and people will like it.

You can tweet your own posts multiple times, but remember that you should not over do it. I know of some people that tweet tens of their posts every day. It is bad policy, because no serious follower will like it. It makes you look really spammy and it should be avoided. Retweet your friends posts a lot and only sometimes retweet your old stuff.

How to Get ReTweets

The only way in twitter-world to get retweets is to have friends on twitter. Your friends are the people that do most of the retweeting. Just notify them of a new blog post and they will retweet your stuff if they find it useful.

Another great way to get people tweeting your blog posts, is to have a retweet button on your blog. I have installed the tweetmeme plugin on my wordpress and it works great. On every post here, there is a retweet button. It makes tweeting so easy, that people tweet my posts quite often.

Conclusion

As the conclusion I am going to tell you what twitter is not and what it is. Remember these points when you start using twitter and you will succeed.

What Twitter is Not

Twitter is not a silver bullet. It is not a marketing channel, where you can post your affiliate links. By posting affiliate links people will stop following you pretty quickly.

What Twitter Really Is

Twitter is a place to connect with other people and communicate. Communication and being social is the only reason to be active there. When you are active, people will be interested in you. As a result you will get people clicking and retweeting your posts.

Now it is time to write the conclusion for this test. As the end results I will tell you how you can get traffic from twitter and what is the real value of the traffic.

Statistics at this point

• Followers: 977
• Following: 1084
• In-clicks total 64 (Google Analytics, stats a day late)

Getting Traffic from Twitter

For every link post you make on twitter, you will get some visitors for your blog. The amount of direct visitors, depends on the amount of followers you have and on the interests of your followers. Tweet text also matters a lot for, because the title either seduces to click or pushes away.

Indirect visitors come from people who re-tweet your posts. The amount of indirect visitors is the most meaningful part, because you can get a lot of visitors this way. The chain of tweets and re-tweets can be huge, and show your link potentially to millions of people.

To get re-tweeted you need two things, friends and good content. Without the other you will not get re-tweeted a lot. Just having followers is not enough. You need to make personal connections with people. It is the only way to get people re-tweeting. Content also matters, because if you have crappy content, then nobody will want to re-tweet it. Would you re-tweet a totally idiotic article just because your friend tweeted it?

Value of Twitter Traffic

To be honest the value of traffic depends 100% on your site. If you are selling something, then you are probably in the clear. On the other hand if you have AdSense on your site, you are screwed.

It has been said that 20% people make 90% of all the ad-clicks on the net. To which category to you presume tweeters belong to? Of course to the ad blind people that do not click on ads. I can tell you that during the whole experiment I have not gotten one single click on my ads.

There is also side note to this. Many people on twitter are early adaptors and there are also a lot of webmasters. When you have quality content, you can show it to the just right people. This means that people who read your articles can also link back  and in that way you can get more traffic.

Conclusion

Make friends and be social, that is the only way. Write good content and you will get visitors. Think a lot about the content of your site before you start investing a lot of time on social media. You should think, will the traffic that you get be the right kind for your site.

Many thanks for my followers for “participating” in this case study. Special thanks to Gabriella Sannino (@SEOcopy) from Level343, for helping and chatting. Hope to keep chatting with you in the future.

Just giving a quick update on how I am doing. I have been quite active in getting more followers. The best way is to follow people and then unfollow them if not followed back. I have tweeted all my new blog posts to promote them. The great success is that I have now received a reasonable amount of clicks from twitter

Statistics at this point

• Followers: 547
• Following: 716
• In-clicks total 34 (Google Analytics, stats a day late)
• For every posted link I get around 3 to 10 clicks

What I’ve done

I have tried to find people with similar interests as I have. For that I  use twitter lists or I just use the search to find the users. Interaction with other users bring me  a lot of followers, because I am visible in many users pages.

I follow a lot of people, but sometimes they do not follow me back. I have used twitter karma to get rid of following people that do not follow me. It shows you all the people that you follow and do not follow you back. Just by pressing on button, you can unfollow all the people that are not following you back. Pretty cool!

What next

• Continue interacting with other people
• Find more interesting people to follow

The whole test has been a bit too much for me. I have started to realise that I am coming almost addicted to the whole thing. I have been tweeting for hours and  I have had a lot of fun. Gotta tell you that I would recommend it to anyone. Just keep in mind that your spouse may not like it so much if you tweet all the time. At least the feedback I’ve received from home has not been that positive.

Statistics at this point

• Followers: 165
• Following: 744
• In-clicks 8 (Google Analytics, unfortunately a day late)

Interaction is the Key

When you interact with people, you can get readers. If you do not talk to other people, then nobody will be interested in your tweets. You’ll be like one in a million if you do not interact. I have honestly commented on other peoples postings, when I have felt that  I had something to say. Spamming is not an option, because real people will block you in a heart beat.

Getting Followers

This time I have mostly used lists that other people have made. For example my site is about blogging, so I find bloggers. This list is a great place to start: @davidsbain/bloggers. Thanks a lot davidsbain from http://www.brandingapps.com/

The tools for searching people are totally useless in comparison to these man made lists. Use them if you need to find people to follow.

Lessons Learned

Interact, Interact and Interact some more. That is the key.

When talking to people, try to stay on top of things. Funny thing happened when I talked with SEO expert Rich Currie from pro website maker. He was asking people what to write about next on his blog. I of course asked him to write about blog link building. The reply came: “I have just done two videos about that”. He flat out refused. In my opinion he should have made even a third video, just for me

Thanks for the nice chat Rich!

What next

• Interaction
• More interaction
• Following people from other peoples lists

Test is moving a long just fine and I believe I am well into reaching my goal of getting 1000 followers in one week. I have used digitalpoint forums to get advice and the advice has been helpful. Finding people to follow has been my main aim, and I believe I have been quite good at it.

The best thing so far: I was added in a list called WebDorks . Thanks for the thumbs up.

Statistics at this point

• Followers: 70
• Following: 419
• In-clicks ZERO

Help from forums

I have posted this experiment to digitalpoint forums to ask for help and info.  Through there I have gotten some great advice. Special thanks to all you guys there! Here is a recap of the best tips

• Add twitter widgets here (done)
• Interact more with other twitter users (Working on it)
• Announcing all blog updates on twitter (done)

Ways of getting followers

Tweetmeme
I have continued to use tweetmeme to find people who have posted similar content as I have. This has worked just fine although it is quite slow.

Lists
As my blog is about blogging I have used the list of bloggers who tweet from problogger. That is a big list and I have not added all of them yet. Hopefully part of them follow me back.

Tools for finding followers
Twellow has been working great. On twellow you can search for people with keywords. It works so that twellow grabs publicly available tweets and then categorises users based on their tweets. Excellent service so far and I am hoping to get a lot of followers from there.

Lessons Learned

The whole thing is about conversation and interaction with people. Having a lot of followers won’t cut it. Interacting with other people is probably the only way to get serious readers. After I have gotten around 1000 followers I am going to start really actively interacting with other people.

What next

• I am going to follow rest of people in probloggers list.
• Following people with Twellow
• More interaction with people

Starting point

I have not been using twitter that much and I want to make a case study about it.  My aim is to get myself to have around thousand followers in a week. These followers must be interested in the same ideas I am and therefore to be interested in my tweets. This whole thing is aimed to be a test how powerful of a traffic builder twitter can be.

Statistics at this point

• Followers: 6
• Following: 11
• In-clicks ZERO

About the test

I am going to continue this study for at least two weeks. This test will be updated at least every other day, and I will provide statistics along the way. These stats include how many followers I have, how many people I am following, and how many visitors this site gets.

I am also going to provide all the tips and tricks that I have used to gain followers. You can yourself help me in this test by starting to follow me on twitter, I will follow you back, I promise

What next

I am going to visit Tweetmeme and find similar posts that I have made there. Then I am going to check people who have tweeted the post, and start following them. Hopefully some of these people will also start to follow me.

Besides this test, I am going to write about blog related stuff like I have done before. Hopefully this case study is a big success. Please write any comments and suggestions how can I make this test more successful.